Pages

Tuesday, 30 December 2014

While, at first glance, it’s an easy assumption to make that
the director has sole creative control over a film, there’s also the matter of
the producers to consider. The producers and production companies attached to a
film are the money backing it, and they get a considerable amount of sway over
what ends up in the final product; they can pull funding to the film if they
don’t agree with what the director wants to do with it. Sure, you will
occasionally get the auteurs that partially or even entirely fund their own
movies themselves, but in the Hollywood system this isn’t always the case. Not
to say that this is always a bad thing, mind you; just that it occasionally
leads to bad decisions. To further illustrate this, let’s get started with
today’s film: This is Walking With Dinosaurs.

The plot: Patchi (played by Justin Long) is a Pachyrhinosaurus
and the runt of his litter, often being bullied by his older brother Scowler
(played by Skyler Stone). As Patchi grows up, he begins to learn his true place
with the herd and, with the help of his friend Alex (played by John Leguizamo)
and his love interest Juniper (played by Tiya Sircar), he must contest his
brother as the leader of the herd.

This is a spectacular looking film with some outstanding
special effects work: The attention to detail on the dinosaurs is truly a
marvel to behold and shows a lot of care and effort was put into it. Not only
that, the CGI is extremely well-integrated with the live-action footage they
shot for it. After seeing films like The Legend Of Hercules that botched that
integration up as badly as they did, this is very welcoming to see. The musical
score is also excellent; while it does a couple of spots where it doesn’t quite
match the action, like the music being a bit too upbeat for the relatively
mellow actions of the dinosaurs on screen, it mostly does a great job at
accompanying the film. Unfortunately, as good as these two are, they are
severely hurt by an executive addition to the film: Voice acting.

In a move that shows not only how little faith movie studios
have in the intelligence of their audiences, but also how important creative
control is, 20th Century Fox made the decision to include voice
acting for the main dinosaurs as a means of better connecting the audience with
the characters on screen. What we end up with as a result of this some of the
most annoying and child-pandering voice acting of any film this year. It’s bad
enough that the voice actors themselves are bad and aren’t capable of doing
this kind of work justice, but they are given some truly horrendous dialogue to
spew out as well. We’re talking near-endless bodily function jokes, pointless
allusions to future history that pretty much breaks any possible immersion, not
to mention Leguizamo as our annoying-as-hell narrator. Leguizamo as Alex never
once shuts up and keeps commenting and cracking jokes about what’s happening
in-film, almost as if the studio-hired writer felt the need to mock the “boring”
silent action that was there before; Skyler Stone turns Scowler into a jock stereotype, and an excessively obnoxious one at that; Justin Long in now way has the ability to convey the emotion needed just through voiceover; and Tiya Sircar is about as plain a love interest as you can find.

To make matters even worse, the four voice actors that
listed in the plot synopsis? That’s it as far as the voice cast goes. They
couldn’t even be bothered to fill in the cast properly, just scraping by with
the bare minimum amount of effort. The voice acting doesn’t even match the
animation half the time anyway; more than a few times in this movie, we have
actors saying lines that aren’t timed properly with what we see, like one scene
where Patchi says to run away from a Gorgosaurus that isn’t even on screen
until after he says it. Pair this with a very out-of-nowhere and pointless
framing device of the nephew of an paleontologist who is told the events of the
film by Alex in the present, which serves to do nothing but pad out the running
time, yet another bad idea since one of the few good things I can say about
this movie is that it is mercifully short.

While all of this sounds bad on its own (and it is), it’s
even worse when you consider what the original plan for the film was: No
dialogue, no narration just the visuals and the music to tell the story. Even
though I think that at least some
narration would have helped with this, like something along the lines of David
Attenborough to help illustrate enough of what’s on screen to maintain that
feel of a nature documentary which it seems like the original film was going
for, that concept sounds like it could have been at least a good film, or even
something great if treated properly. Instead, what we end up getting is a
studio that is too afraid to take risks and going for the easy option to
(supposedly) appease younger audiences. If the last few years have taught us
anything, with the successes of How To Train Your Dragon, Frozen and everything
Laika has brought to cinemas thus far, it’s that audiences are more than
willing to try new things and don’t need to be talked down to to enjoy themselves,
even younger audiences. This is the kind of cynicism, that children are stupid
and will watch anything, which is hurting the film industry as a whole.

All in all, this is a perfect example of fixing what isn’t
broken: They took what was originally a great idea, with a documentary-style
nature film about dinosaurs, and filled it with bad voice acting and horrible
dialogue in a vain attempt to keep the interest of children who would watch it; the voice overs are seriously bad enough to negate what works about this film. This should go down in legend as a monument to bad ideas. It’s worse than I,
Frankenstein as, despite having far superior special effects, the horrible
production choices here far outweigh whatever good this film once had. However,
it’s still not as bad as Love Is Now, which offended me on a more personal
level. This isn’t even a film I can recommend for kids as a rental, where
parents could leave them to be supervised by Uncle TV for an hour and a half;
if a fan edit crops up that removes all of the stupid voiceover and just sticks
with the original idea for the film, maybe then I could recommend checking it
out. Until then, this should be avoided at all costs.

Monday, 29 December 2014

On the surface, it seems that adapting a work of theatre
into a movie would be a lot easier than adapting from a different work like a
book or a video game, and to a degree it is. But they are still two different
media, however similar they may be, and in order to do it right it can’t just
be a simple copy-and-paste job. For a
good example of stage to screen adaptation done right, look at 11 Things I Hate
About You, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming Of The Shrew: It took
what is, in the modern age, the most difficult Shakespeare work to portray due
its rather screwed-up gender politics and essentially left only the framework
and changed the rest in order to make it work, and for the most part it did. A
bad example of this? … Let’s get into today’s film: This is August: Osage
County.

The plot: After the disappearance of Beverly Weston (played
by Sam Shepard), his estranged family reunite at his house in the titular Osage
County in Colorado. As secrets and underlying tensions are revealed, numerous
fights break out amongst them, but maybe there is a chance that they can
reconcile their differences and at least find some togetherness in the wake of
this event.

This is a great ensemble cast to have in a single film:
Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Juliette Lewis,
Benedict Cumberbatch, Abigail Breslin; it reads like a film buff’s wet dream,
and it all leads into great performances from our actors… sort of, and it is
here that we get to the ugly side of adaptation. Their performances would great
if this was a traditional theatre performance of the story, where such things
like the ability to see more of the actors’ faces and read their emotions don’t
exist. Instead, what we get here is a lot of overacting and melodrama that
strains on whatever emotional impact the story could have had under different
circumstances. What’s more, the premise is almost beat-for-beat the same as
This Is Where I Leave You, and for as many issues as I had with that film, I
can at least see that they were acting within the parameters of a film and were
able to get some decent emotion out of the proceedings at times. I’m not saying
that their acting is terrible, mind you: Streep exhibits a lot of woozy
authority as Violet, Beverly’s wife and the matriarch of the family, a role
that would’ve been played by Faye Dunaway were this made 30 years ago given how
boisterous she gets at times.

Of course, as was the case with Dunaway in Mommie Dearest,
if the script and characters fitted with that kind of melodrama then their
performances could have worked. Unfortunately, what we do get is a host of characters are each their special brand of
unlikable. *SPOILERS* Throughout the
film, certain characters end up confessing to adultery, incest and even one
gets caught in the midst of possible pedophilia. Now, as bad as this all
sounds, it might have worked were it
framed in the right way; not every fictional character has to be moral, as
fiction would be decidedly boring if they were. However, how they are framed in
this film is that not only do they feel justified in what they are doing, but that
the audience should feel pity for them because of it. To put in the simplest
possible terms why this fails on all accounts, here’s the play-by-play on the
potential pedophilia scene: Jean (played by Abigail Breslin), the daughter of Barbara
(played by Julia Roberts), is smoking weed with the fiancée of Karen (played by
Juliette Lewis), one of Barbara’s sisters. He has his shirt open, it seems like
they’re getting close and Jean is only 14 years old. Then Johnna, Violet’s caregiver,
brains the fiancée with a shovel after she sees them together (one of the few
good parts of the entire film) then Karen takes him inside. When the fiancée is
taken inside, although it is buried a bit under the rest of the audio, you can
hear him say “She told me she was 15!” We’ll ignore the fact that this is an
incredibly stupid thing to say, and instead focus on when Barbara confronts
Karen inside. She then proceeds to say that her fiancée isn’t entirely to blame
for whatever may have happened and that Jean must have had a part in it too.
This film has been billed on more than a few sites as being a ‘black comedy’,
same as the previously reviewed Horrible Bosses 2, but at least there it had
actual jokes written into the script. Not all of them worked, and some of them
definitely went too far, but at least it framed itself as a comedy with
punchlines in it. Here, all we have to go on is morally vile and rather stupid
people doing horrible things to one another and doing their best to justify it
by pushing the blame onto others; either I’m missing the joke or my complaints
about adaptation failure are pointless since the source material was absolute
garbage to begin with. What makes matter worse is that, whenever this film
tries to have more emotional moments and make us care about the main
characters, it almost wants us to forget how putrid these people are and feel
sorry for them because of how dysfunctional their lives are. Sorry, but no
dice.

All in all, this is a complete disaster. The acting is
misplaced and doesn’t work within the film’s context of being a film, the
writing paints every character as being nasty to everyone around them and in no
way deserving of sympathy and the adaptation, even coming from someone who isn’t
familiar with the original work, outright fails out of not seeming to realize
the different requirements of screen and stage. It’s worse than Annie, as at
the very least that film had some new ideas on how to adapt from stage to
screen, but it still isn’t as bad as Planes: Fire And Rescue, which has far
worse production values. Don’t let the admittedly attractive cast list fool
you; there is nothing good to be found here.

Sunday, 28 December 2014

Peter Jackson may serve as one of the greatest cinematic
success stories in recent memory: From his humble beginnings with bat-shit
insane cult films like Bad Taste, Meet The Feebles and Braindead, he went on to
craft himself as a directing legend through his adaptation of the Lord Of The
Rings trilogy, making himself one of the most critically and financially
successful filmmakers of all time. Not only that, Weta Digital, a special
effects company co-founded by Jackson himself, has also become a powerhouse in Hollywood
due to their work on the LOTR films and have gone on to do SFX work for films
like Avatar, The Avengers and the Planet Of The Apes reboot series. Today’s
film marks the end of an era, as after 13 years and over a thousand minutes of screen time, this is the (supposed) final film Peter Jackson will make based on the
works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It has a lot to live up to, to put it mildly. This is
The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies.

The plot: Not long after Bilbo (played by Martin Freeman),
Thorin (played by Richard Armitage) and his company of dwarves drive Smaug
(played by Benedict Cumberbatch) out of their ancestral home of Erebor, armies
of men, elves and Orcs seek to lay claim to the riches within the mountain. As
Thorin’s isolation grows deeper, and Gandalf’s (played by Ian McKellen)
desperation to keep the peace increases, the Five Armies rally at the Lonely
Mountain for the final battle that will decide not only the victor of the
mountain, but also help decide the fate of Middle-Earth.

We’re talking about Peter Jackson here, so it goes without
saying: This. Is. Beautiful. Jackson’s perfectionism and attention to detail is
all on display here with the same gorgeous landscapes, world-building and grand
scale as all of his previous Tolkienian efforts. Weta Digital continues to
build their near-immaculate portfolio with great creature design and animation,
proving why they are the top dogs of the industry far as I’m concerned. The
cast all bring their A-game to this film, with even the minor cameos giving
good performances in this: Freeman and McKellen are great as always in their
roles, Armitage gets a chance to flex some dramatic muscle with how his
character develops in this film, Cumberbatch is still intimidating as both
Smaug and the Necromancer, Luke Evans does a great job as Bard and a surprise
Billy Connolly as the dwarf Dáin is engaging in his role.

However, this film has got a couple of rather large issues;
the biggest of them all would have to be the content of the film itself. Imagine,
if you will, that The Two Towers solely consisted of the battle of Helm’s Deep
and nothing else. That is this movie:
The titular Battle Of The Five Armies makes up for about 90-95% of the overall
running time, and while having a battle this big in your movie may seem good on
paper, it doesn’t work nearly as well in practice. Say what you will about the
previous Hobbit films, at least they had the good sense to vary the action on
screen: The first film had scenes like Bilbo’s encounter with the trolls and
the dwarves fighting the goblins in the Misty Mountains; the second film had
the trippy sequence in Mirkwood and the company confronting Smaug in Erebor. By
comparison, the majority of the action takes place in the plains and mountains
outside of Erebor and rarely if ever leave them. Don’t get me wrong: The action itself is
well-directed, acted and animated, with Howard Shore’s amazing score to back it.
It’s just that, regardless of how good it is, it gets more than a little
monotonous before too long. Every so often, we get intercuts of the characters
reacting to said action and the consequences of it, which admittedly is done
well, but the majority of the film is one very long action set piece. This is
exactly what many other critics feared it would be and it pains me to say that
they called it.

Admittedly, this film does try its hand at dramatic
story-telling alongside the action, but even that doesn’t feel like it was
handled well: Thorin’s character arc of suffering from dragon sickness (or gold
fever, in layman’s terms) feels like it was rushed, an impressive feat for a
movie that reaches nearly 2 and a half hours; both Bilbo and Smaug are poorly
handled here, with the former being pushed to the side for a lot of it and the
latter *SPOILERS* being killed off
rather unceremoniously before the opening credits even start; plot points about
certain parties’ reasons for wanting to claim the Lonely Mountain aren’t given
resolution (although I highly suspect this being a case of ‘Buy the extended
edition’ syndrome); and the ending… anyone out there who was annoyed by how the
first movie and even Return Of The King were resolved will be equally annoyed
by this because they pull the exact same Deus Ex Aquilla crap here as well.
Bear in mind that I actually didn’t take as much issue with this when it
happened the first two times, but this
time it seriously got to me. Honestly, the best part of the film is the
brief epilogue with Bilbo returning to the Shire, which leads into an ending
that perfectly syncs with the Fellowship Of The Ring and links the two
trilogies together; it makes for the funniest and most thematically strong part
of the film.

All in all, this is still Jackson-grade production work with
great acting, direction and effects work. However, the story feels very thin
and just serves as the framework for the big climatic battle that cap off this
trilogy of films, and knowing that this epic saga ends with what is undoubtedly
the weakest of all six films is very disheartening. After how much I loved The
Desolation Of Smaug from last year, this is extremely disappointing. It ranks
higher than The Babadook, since this doesn’t have any unbearably annoying
characters like the child in that film, but below Penguins Of Madagascar, which
was simply more fun and engaging to watch. This is worth seeing as a finale to the story,
but I can’t say that it’s a satisfying finale.

Saturday, 27 December 2014

It’s a very bittersweet experience seeing a film like this; Robin
Williams is one of my favourite comedians of all time with a wide pedigree of
talent (despite a couple of film clunkers) whether it’s his excellent stand-up
shows, his classic film roles like the Genie in Aladdin and Peter Pan in Hook,
or his surprising talent at darker roles like One Hour Photo and his guest spot
on Law & Order: SVU (Seriously, he is kind of terrifying there). It is a
tragedy when anyone dies, but knowing who he was and how it happened… I’m
getting choked up as I write this just thinking about it. But his works still
remain to warm the hearts and tickle the funnybones of audiences for a long
while yet; I firmly believe that men live on so long as they are remembered,
and I doubt that Williams will be forgotten anytime soon. With that, let’s take
a look at his final live-action film role that was also dedicated to his memory:
This is Night At The Museum: Secret Of The Tomb.

The plot: Larry Daley (played by Ben Stiller) discovers that
the ancient Egyptian tablet that brings the museum exhibits to life every night
is starting to fade. With the aid of his friends in the museum, including
Theodore Roosevelt (played by Robin Williams) and Ahkmenrah (played by Rami
Malek), he makes his way to the British Museum of Natural History to find
Ahkmenrah’s father (played by Ben Kingsley) and hopefully restore the tablet
before the exhibits stop moving for good.

As with the previous two films, we have a cast full of
capable comedic actors. Also as with the previous two films, they aren’t given
that much material to work with. Stiller seems to be stuck with the same awkward
comedy writers have been giving him for the last few years, which largely makes
for rather dull thuds rather than jokes that land. For everyone else, while
they have built some good chemistry with each other that makes for good rapport
between characters and decent performances, they suffer from reading off the
same script as Stiller. It is nice seeing Dick van Dyke again though, albeit in
a small cameo. The new cast members we get are mixed at best: Ben Kingsley has
a very minor role and just does what he does considering; Dan Stevens as
Lancelot seems to get the role with the most meat on it and does a great job at
pulling off the Arthurian grandiosity that it calls for; and then we get to
Rebel Wilson as the night guard of the British Museum. As much as I don’t want
to slag off Rebel too much, as she isn’t a bad actor by any stretch… she is
annoying to the point of unwatchable in this film. She gets the definite short
end of the stick with the writing, as the script doesn’t seem to know what to
do with her other than just make her abrasive. Well, well done on that front but
that doesn’t make her funny.

Aside from the jokes, this is a pretty flimsy script in
terms of story; it somehow manages to have even less story than the last film.
The plot boils down to this: Tablet losing power, go to British museum, get way
to save it from Kingsley that is amazingly simple (like, almost insulting easy), restore tablet, roll
credits. Then again, the Night At The Museum films are less about plot and more
about spectacle: It uses the plot as a thinly disguised excuse to string
together creative ways of museum exhibits coming to life, which admittedly is
done fine here. The definite highlight in that regard would have to be when
Daley ends up inside an M.C. Escher painting, with a very interesting visual
style to go along with it. However, what character plot is used in this film only really applies to two characters: Daley
and Sir Lancelot. Daley and his relationship with his son, and his realization
that he needs to let his son discover his own path in the world, is the big
subplot of the film and to call it hackneyed is an understatement; it’s one of
those plot threads where literally everyone sees the right thing to do except
for the man himself, which is annoying to see in any medium. To help drive the
point home, we have Lancelot talking of the son’s potential and a weird running
joke about a wax Neanderthal that was sculpted to look like Daley (and is also played by Ben Stiller) and who
thinks that Daley is his father. While the former is fine given the subplot,
the latter is confusing for one simple reason: Because of the make-up work,
they managed to make Stiller not look recognizably like himself… when his
character’s entire reason for being is to make a joke about how similar he
looks to another character played by himself. This might be the biggest failed
running joke of the year, and it’s kind of amazing how badly it is botched. The
overall subplot, though, is something we have seen in countless other films and
is mostly just boring at this rate.

The character arc involving Sir Lancelot, however, is where
the film hits some major good points. *SPOILERS*
His existential crisis about being a wax sculpture and that Lancelot himself
doesn’t historically exist, which feels like it was cut from the same cloth as
the original Toy Story, on its own makes for good writing moments and a new
take on the overall idea, that I honestly thought would have been explored in
the series prior to this film, but then we get a credo from Roosevelt about the
nature of museum exhibits and how they inspire and teach people that thickens
it into something that, in a stronger film, could have made for something
amazing. It’s still good here, but it is hurt by its proximity to a monkey stopping
a lava flow with his urine. Lancelot as a character, admittedly, is a bit
abrasive once he starts talking (Him fighting the triceratops skeleton was cool
to watch, though) but once he makes a heel turn the character reaches the
stronger points of his character arc, with a little help from some surprise
cameos.

All in all, this is just okay. The humour is very
hit-and-miss and the returning cast does well with the roles they have grown
comfortable with over three films. The script has some clever moments, with a
nice explanation for the MacGuffin tablet, but the truly inspired moments are
few and far between. In terms of being Williams’ swan song, his final scene in
this film is kind of beautiful and adds even more to the idea of inspiring
others with your image; for an actor like him, it’s actually a pretty good note
to end on. This film ranks higher than The House Of Magic, as the writers here
at least tried for some nuance, but just below The Muppets Most Wanted, which
had better comedic writing. It's an okay film to take the kids to, but it doesn't have a whole lot for older audiences.

Friday, 26 December 2014

One of the bigger things that I’ve started doing as a result
of my movie-watching is that great cinematic tradition of the double feature,
only setting up my own with two films that start and end close enough to each
other. Hell, back when I was first starting films as religiously as I do now, I’d
even do quadruple features and that inevitably involved movies that couldn’t
have any less to do with each other. Last time I remember watching multiple
films at the cinema in one day, I went out to see The Invisible Woman (which was
decent), Chinese Puzzle (which was really good), Only Lovers Left Alive (which
was fantastic) and Any Day Now (which was rage-inducing), meaning I saw a
historical piece, a French comedy, an artsy film and a wannabe Oscar-bait film
in one sitting; variety is the jam on the toast of life. Since I’ve started
writing reviews on this blog, I’ve promised myself that I wouldn’t make a habit
of doing this, as I work better writing reviews immediately after watching the
film in question. Christmas Day, however, I made an exception as they were
doing a few special advanced screenings of films that won’t be out officially
till next year; no way I’m missing that. The two I saw that day were The
Imitation Game and the film I'm covering today: Into The Woods.

The plot: A baker and his wife (played by James Corden and
Emily Blunt respectively) have been cursed by a witch (played by Meryl Streep)
so that they can never have children. In order to stop the curse, they need to
retrieve four items: A cow as white as milk, a hood as red as blood, hair as
yellow as corn and a slipper as pure as gold; but in order to collect them,
they run into some rather familiar characters.

Words cannot express how happy I am to see James Corden in a
big Hollywood production; the fact that it’s a musical makes it even better.
Not only that, he manages to stand well right alongside this pretty
high-profile cast list, all of whom do extremely well for the most part: Meryl
Streep puts her pipes to better use than the last movie musical she was in (The
dog’s breakfast that is Mamma Mia!) and gives her role the kind of screen
presence and power that it needs; Emily Blunt, even considering everyone else’s
performances, does the best job of any of them in being able to equally act and
sing and shows off some impressive singing ability to boot; Lilla Crawford, in
her film debut, turns what could have been a rather annoying portrayal of Little
Red Riding Hood into a rather endearing scamp for lack of a better term; Chris
Pine goes full camp here, with easily one of the funniest musical number
performances of the last few years as Prince Charming; Daniel Huttlestone, who
did a great job in 2012’s Les Miserables, brings his best to this film also as
Jack; Anna Kendricks continues to be the most successful survivor of the
Twilight series with a great performance as Cinderella; and Johnny Depp, in a
rather casting choice for the Wolf, gives major ick factor with some rather…
unsettling undertones in his performance of Hello, Little Girl, but
nevertheless does well bringing back that voice that helped make Tim Burton’s
Sweeney Todd as good as it was. Really, the only weak spots I can gleam are
Mackenzie Mauzy as Rapunzel and Billy Magnussen as her Prince, and that’s only
because they aren’t in a whole lot of the movie despite how beautiful Mauzy’s
singing voice is.

In terms of highlights, musically speaking, there are some
definite gems in this already jewel-encrusted production: Agony has Pine going
all-out and gloriously over-the-top and managing to impress despite my
skepticism about his casting; the prologue song is as great as ever, with the
entire cast meshing together in a way that sets a great precedent for the rest
of the film; Last Midnight, the witch’s big number, has Streep giving the sort
of performance that makes careers but is undoubtedly a highlight for her far as
I’m concerned; and Your Fault, the singular song that shows why Stephen Sondheim
is a goddamn genius, is performed with the kind of nimbleness needed for this
complex of a singing arrangement.

Now, for the business of the talking the musical itself, and
bear in mind that this is my very first experience with the material at all: As
Marvel has no doubt shown over the last several years, geeks have a real thing
for shared universes; creating a shared universe for Grimm fairy tales,
especially with how it is written here, is a great move and very well handled
with the meshing of these different tales not only working but also managing to
wring some real emotion and heart out of the resulting soup of stories. However,
a major sticking point for me, aside from how it felt overlong at times and a couple of plot threads that are left hanging a bit,
is the ending. Not only does the ending feel abrupt, it also is more than a
little underwhelming and somehow feels like that something got lost in
translation from stage to screen. Kind of odd that I’d get this feeling,
considering the original creators Sondheim and James Lapine scored and wrote
this film respectively, but I’m sure I’ll get confirmation once I seek out the
musical proper, which is definitely a good idea if this film is anything to go
by.

All in all, this is a very entertaining watch. The cast all
do a great job in their roles and manage to balance the acting/singing dynamic
that some film musicals seem to inexplicably miss along the way, all backed by
Sondheim’s amazing song creations, Lapine’s fantastical script and director Rob
Marshall doing very well at tying it all together. It fares better than The
Equalizer, as this without a doubt is a lot more creative with its story, but
it’s not as good as Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and that might just be
my weakness for comic book films showing. For any lovers of the musical genre,
this is definitely one to check out.

Thursday, 25 December 2014

Looks like it’s typecast time again, this time turning our
spotlight on Benedict Cumberbatch who has made a real name for himself in the
last few years playing neurotic and narcissistic geniuses both fictional (the
titular detective in Sherlock) and non-fictional (Julian Assange in The Fifth
Estate). In fact, Cumberbatch is getting so close to absolute overexposure that
he might as well be called Rule 63 Jennifer Lawrence at this rate. However,
also like Lawrence, his performances in films are pretty much guaranteed to be
good even if he isn’t always in the best films (August: Osage County, The Fifth
Estate, Star Trek: Into Darkness depending on who you ask) so I’m not in a good
enough position to complain about that. What do we get with today’s film? Time
to find out: This is The Imitation Game.

The plot: Mathematician Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch)
is hired to help the British military crack the Enigma Code that the Nazis use
to scramble their radio messages, designing a special machine to do so. As the
work he and his team have to do becomes more complex, and certain personal
details about Turing himself are on the verge of becoming public, Turing will
have to keep more than just his own secrets in order to survive.

Even without highlighting Cumberbatch, the cast here all do
an outstanding job: Matthew Goode does well as Turing’s rival and eventually
friend Hugh Alexander, whose transition between the two is a lot smoother than
in most other films that feature such a turn; Charles Dance makes a decent role
out of his admittedly stalely written part of Cdr. Denniston, showing the kind
of authority and presence needed for the role; Mark Strong is very captivating
as the shadowy head of MI6 Stewart Menzies; Rory Kinnear shows real conviction
as Nock, a detective who investigates Turing years after working on the Enigma
code after a supposed robbery; and Keira Knightley does a surprisingly good job
interacting with Cumberbatch and even managing to keep toe-to-toe with him at
points. I say surprising, because the last film I saw her in was A Dangerous
Method, where her annoying Dr. Ruth Westheimer voice made for one of the worse
parts of an already dismal watch; thankfully, nowhere the case here.

Now to actually discuss Cumberbatch in the role and it is
here that I officially include my disclaimer about not looking for perfect historical
accuracy; I’m judging this film, and every aspect thereupon, on its own merits
alone. Cumberbatch infuses his performance with a certain awkwardness that is
to be expected from such a role, but it’s different from, say, his portrayal of
Sherlock: Where Sherlock was socially awkward because he understand social
interaction and the human psyche better in theory than in practice, Turing is
socially awkward because he genuinely doesn’t
understand social interaction. He has a far better understanding of
mathematics, and through that the ideas of computing and artificial
intelligence, and uses that as his only basis on which to judge human
behaviour. To show this, we will have scenes of Turing discuss breaking the
code of the Enigma machine juxtaposed with him trying to figure out what his
colleagues are actually saying, through their own code of regular human speech.
Considering Alan Turing (retroactive as it may have been) showed signs of
having ASD in real life, this is actually a rather accurate and fitting portrayal
of someone with autism trying to get a hang of social interaction; it feels
pretty familiar to me, at the very least. Not to say that he never interacts
with others socially; it’s just that, when he does, he does it in so matter-of-factly
that it could easily come across as either forced or just plain trolling, but
Cumberbatch pulls it off like it’s second nature to him. He also does
extraordinarily at showing some of the more tragic parts of Alan Turing’s life,
particularly when exploring his homosexuality. The ending, *SPOILERS* which shows him after his sentencing for ‘gross
indecency’ being physically crippled due to his court-mandated hormonal therapy
to help curb his homosexual desires (Way to go, 1950’s!), is crushing enough
just to think about but Cumberbatch makes the result absolutely heart-breaking,
especially considering how Turing ultimately ended up taking his own life in
the end.

The overall writing, not just that centered on Turing, is
very well-done: The dialogue has that kind of dry wit that I’ve come to love
from British films and television and the actors carry it off with just the
right amount of venom to make it stick and get some chuckles out of the
audience; and as a story, it does a great job at building tension over Turing’s
progress with the bombe he constructed to decode Enigma, even considering the
historical nature of the story where the events are set in stone. One definite
highlight of the film is the moral dilemma Turing and his group find themselves
in *SPOILERSAGAIN* when they finally
decrypt the Enigma code but know that they have to be careful with how much
they can let the enemy know that they know; as a result, they inevitably have
to let some Nazi attacks happen to prevent suspicion, permitting a necessary
evil for a greater good. Actually, speaking of the Nazi attacks, the CGI shots
used for the planes and the bombs they drop might be the only real down point
of the film; to put it mildly, it looks rather silly but thankfully there aren’t
too many of them to detract from the film in any real way.

All in all, even if you’re going into this without any
knowledge about Alan Turing and his accomplishments, this is a definite winner.
The outstanding cast, led by a top-of-his-game Cumberbatch, does wonders with
the witty and well-crafted script they have been given; how this screenplay
ended up on the Black List for as long as it did, I’ll never know. It fares
better than Interstellar, as this doesn’t feature an ending that throws
everything into a mass of confusion, but it ranks just below The Lego Movie, which
has a core message that is more widespread in who it will appeal to, myself
included. This gets a definite recommendation, especially for fans of
Cumberbatch’s work as this might be his best performance to date.

Wednesday, 24 December 2014

Escapism is a peculiar thing: By its very nature, it is
meant to help us escape from the real world through fiction, yet it seems to
affect us more the closer to reality it is. Maybe it’s because it helps give a
better view of our own lives through an outside observer, or maybe it’s just
because we like the idea of familiarity in an unfamiliar place, but for
whatever the reason this seems to be the case. Personally, I use escapist
fiction as therapy: A means for me to cathartically let free whatever pent-up
feelings and emotions I have, be they anger, melancholy, giddiness, thirst for
knowledge or what have you, in a way that doesn’t interfere with those around
me. With this idea of therapeutic escapism in mind, let’s look at today’s film:
This is Nebraska.

The plot: Woody (played by Bruce Dern) receives a letter
announcing that he won a $1 million sweepstakes and to come to Lincoln,
Nebraska to collect it. His sons David (played by Will Forte) and Ross (played
by Bob Odenkirk), along with Woody’s wife Kate (played by June Squibb), try to
tell him that it is an obvious mail scam but he is still determined to collect
his winnings. David eventually decides to drive him on a road trip to Lincoln,
if for nothing more than to get him to shut up about it.

I’ll admit, this was a hard film for me to pin down and I’m
still not sure if I entirely get it. However, from what I have managed to gleam of it, this is a very impressive script with
subtle yet very emotional writing. On the way to Lincoln, Woody and David
arrive in Woody’s hometown of Hawthorne, Nebraska and, upon talking with family
and old friends, Woody’s past gets dug up for better and for worse: His
struggles after returning from Vietnam, his constant drinking, his purportedly
bad money-handling, not to mention his romantic relationships. It seems that
everyone in this film is fixated, sometimes to an unhealthy degree, with what
has been and gone, save for one person: Woody himself. Woody focuses far more
on the present, wanting to just the most of what little time he has left being
as content as he can be given his circumstances. Not only that, he wants to do
the best he can for his sons as well, leave them with memories that keep him in
their minds as more than just a drunk with a pipe dream. This latter point is
made even better because of how good Dern and Forte are at portraying that
father-son relationship. The director, Alexander Payne, reportedly signed on
Forte to be in the role because he would be more believable in said role and he
isn’t half wrong. Forte may have more experience with straight-up comedies, as
his history as a cast member Saturday Night Live and the voice of Lincoln in
The Lego Movie, but here he shows a lot of talent in a more serious role. This
is The Judge levels of believability that these two actors could be real father
and son, if not more so.

All this is easily enough for a film to go on, but a little
further digging shows something else that actually hits even closer to home and
it all leads back to what I started this review talking about: Escapism.
Throughout the film, Woody’s family does their best to convince him, and
everyone he tells the news to, that he didn’t actually win anything and that he’s
just chasing a fantasy. However, it can easily be argued that, despite how
distant Woody seems to be at times, he is aware that the $1 million is just a
fantasy but he is chasing it regardless… and no-one can blame him. Even before
the road trip begins, we already see him using alcohol to get away from
everything and given how much of a cad Kate is to him, I hardly blame him.
Kate, while it is clear that she loves him, is completely unable to hold her
tongue about what she thinks of people, least of all her husband: Very
controlling, very negative, very condescending at times, and while her
performance does lead to some laughs in that kooky grandmother kind of way,
there’s a definite annoyance with the character as well. Not only that, it is
clear that Woody likes the positive attention he gets from the people of
Hawthorne find out about his ‘winnings’, who congratulate him and cheer him on.
Of course, with adoration comes people wanting to settle old debts, some going
to rather extreme lengths to do so, but that only adds to it: *SPOILERS* When the townspeople get a
hold of the sweepstakes letter, and realize that he hasn’t won anything, you
can visibly see Woody weaken as if something has been taken from him like going
after that fortune was the only thing keeping him going, making a rather
heart-breaking moment.

To add to this, it seems like David shares in his father’s
want to escape from how sucky the real world can be. We are shown that David is
also unhappy with his life, going through a recent breakup and lack of business
at his work, and almost seems to want to chase his father’s fantasy as well. He
is shown numerous in the film being the enabler to his father’s wishes like agreeing
to drive him to Lincoln in the first place and having drinks with him despite
Woody’s problems with alcohol. He admits that he is going along with the
charade as a means of just pleasing his dad, but you can definitely see how
much that means to him through the writing and how well Forte plays the role. This
eventually culminates in a pretty outstanding ending, where both Woody and
David’s character arcs reach their pinnacle and result in one of the
heart-warming moments in cinema this year.

All in all, this is a bit of a slow burner but a very solid
film. With how well the script, the performances and the direction, not to
mention the simple but fitting musical score, all fit together here, I’d be
surprised if this didn’t become a go-to film for study in high schools and
universities. At its core, this is a film about trying to escape from the
present reality, all the while trying to let go of the past; I’m sure there are
at least a few people who can see some truth in that. This ranks higher than
Fat Pizza Vs. Housos, as the enjoyment gotten here is a lot more mindful, but
just under Dallas Buyers Club, which hits even harder emotionally. No question,
I recommend checking this one out.

Tuesday, 23 December 2014

I’ve gone into films with low expectations before: The Best Of Me, Tammy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. However, of everything I’ve gone out
to see this year (including a couple that I have yet to see), this is
undoubtedly the one I was dreading the most. Whether it was my attachment to
the 1982 version, the snippet of the music I got from the trailer or the
general impression I got from its attempts to modernize the script, I couldn’t
be looking forward to this any less. Really, the best thing connected to this
film for me for the longest time was this tweet from one of my favourite rappers:

Can't say I disagree with him, either; as much as I prefer to let a film speak for itself without getting hit
by my preconceptions as it talks, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t factor into
the viewing experience. That said, as we look at today’s film, I will do my
best to put my initial impressions to one side and let it stand or fall on its
own: This is the 2014 remake of Annie.

The plot: Annie (played by Quvenzhané Wallis) is a foster
child living in New York under the tipsy eye of Miss Hannigan (played by
Cameron Diaz) when she literally runs into Will Stacks (played by Jamie Foxx),
a business tycoon who’s running for Mayor of New York. After their chance
encounter results in an increase in the polls, Guy (played by Bobby Cannavale),
Will’s political advisor, thinks that Annie should stay with Will for a few
weeks to give him some better publicity. As Annie spends time with them, Will
and his assistant Grace (played by Rose Byrne) grow a liking to her and Annie
might have found the family she has been looking for after all.

Most of the cast do a good job in their roles: Wallis shows
off how she became the youngest actress to be nominated for an Oscar with a
performance that can stand next to the older actors with ease; Diaz, while not
having nearly as much screen presence as Carol Burnett, does well with how this
film’s interpretation of Hannigan is written; and Foxx fills his rather assholey
character with enough charisma to make for the best thing in the movie.
Probably the main fault with the casting is Bobby Cannavale, who despite his
rather impressive output in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine is underwhelming in his
role here, over trying at every turn to be funny and just coming across as annoying.
Why he is trying so hard to be funny, however, is just one item on the laundry
list of problems with this movie.

Pretense, much like irony, privilege and ethics in video
game journalism, is so over-used by people who don’t know its real meaning that
it has all but lost that meaning. It is mostly used in relation to more artsy
films that are so obtuse in how they are made or in the message they’re trying
to convey that they confuse the audience, with pretense being the easy word to
fall back on to describe it. So why am I using it to describe this big-budget
Hollywood musical? Because this film tries so hard to poke fun at its source
material, and the musical genre in general, for how hokey it is that it fails
to see just how hokey it itself is being. The literal first thing we see is a
red-haired girl called Annie talking in front of her class and being mocked for
being too boring, followed swiftly by our film’s Annie who engages her audience
into an instrumental number that ends with the entire class cheering. I refrain
from calling this blatant because it only gets worse from there: Constant
in-jokes about the original film, fourth wall jokes about the characters
singing out of nowhere; none of which actually land and instead are just
annoying to sit through.

Easily the most insensitive part of this film’s need to mock
everything that it itself is being is when Will takes Annie to the movies:
Moonquake Lake, a pretty obvious spoof of paranormal romances like Twilight,
with Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis and Rihanna lining their wallets with some random cameos. Grace makes mention of how Will’s mobile phone company paid 500
grand for product placement in the film, and then says that said product
placement is the only thing keeping the film industry going. I cannot express
in mere words how angry I was in the cinema hearing this cynical drivel in a
film that’s this focus-grouped. However, this line has a bit more relevancy to
the film proper once delved into a little bit: Sure, product placement may not
be as integral to films as this claims (Unless your name is Michael Bay), but
product placement does play a crucial
part in another visual medium: Music videos, especially over the last decade or
so. While in context to films in general it’s almost offensive in how little
respect it has for the art of filmmaking, it makes perfect sense in context to this film as, with how shallow the end
product is, this film is little more than a glorified long-form music video.
What makes this even funnier is that the movie-in-a-movie is credited to Phil
Lord and Christopher Miller, the filmmakers who managed to churn out the
surprising successes of 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie. I can only laugh at this, considering how much better a job Lord and Miller would have done with this film and its
intent, ignoring how 22 Jump Street turned out.

While it may seem unfair of me to bag out this film for the
changes in music from the original, since the 1982 version wasn’t exactly pragmatic in
following the stage musical (I want NYC, dammit!), this is beyond the
pale in how badly it treats the music. What’s worse is that the soundtrack had
a very interesting idea buried in there somewhere: Whenever the orphans are
singing, like in Maybe or Hard Knock Life, they make their own instrumentation;
Thumping of brooms and mops on the floor to make the driving beat of Hard Knock
Life, and hand claps and chest slaps for Maybe. During the opening credits, we
get literal music of the city with car horns, bike bells and street musicians
adding to the instrumentation. Then, there is a scene
later on at a museum event for Will Stacks’ company where Annie sings
Opportunity with an orchestra backing her. This could have made for a nice
musical arc and added a layer to the overall film, if it weren’t for the fact
that the above songs as well as every other one in this film still have studio
instrumentation, shattering whatever nuance the soundtrack could have had. Said
instrumentation is loud and very hip-hop with its thumping drums and stabs of
brass, which detracts from the soundtrack immensely by all sounding extremely
generic. To make matters worse, we have also have the scourge of Auto-Tune to
deal with as well, most notably in their rendition of Tomorrow where it is more
obvious than everywhere else that it’s being used. The singers themselves are a
mixed bag: As Willow “Whip Your Hair” Smith was originally cast to be Annie,
Wallis sounds golden by comparison and even standalone; Foxx, the only member
of the cast who has some history as a singer, further proves why he is the best
thing about this film; Byrne is way too soft-spoken to be made out half of the
time; Diaz is just average; and Cannavale is incredibly bland, so they mercifully
only give him one song to sing in.

I was originally just going to forgo any direct comparisons
with the 1982 film, but since the film itself didn’t refrain from doing just
that I won’t either. This is a remake of Annie in the same way that David
Cronenberg’s The Fly is a remake: Only the framework of the story survived the
adaptation process, in terms of story. While modernizing the plot of Annie isn’t
a bad idea in it of itself, how it
was done here is another matter. To start things off, we have Oliver Warbucks
being renamed William Stacks. They literally named the American billionaire
Bill Stacks, a name that sounds like the result of mating a lame rapper with a
V.I.L.E. henchman. We also have the former’s relatively downplayed conservatism
and elitism dialed up heavily with Bill’s visible disdain to be near the other
99%, showing the kind of modernizing and heavy-handedness that has made recent
Dr. Seuss adaptations so bad. The plot’s linchpin, the reason why Will brings
in Annie in the first place, is extremely cynical and something that should not
be associated with a musical that is, at its heart, feel-good entertainment for
the whole family. The biggest offence, however, is how they handled Rooster,
famously played in the original by Tim Curry: Neither he or Lily St. Regis are
in this version. The closest we get is Guy, who essentially carries out the
same plan and whose actor tries desperately to ape Curry in his performance with
numerous attempts to chew on the scenery and take the spotlight much like Curry
did. Unfortunately, Cannavale abjectly fails at this and both he and the film as a whole come out worse because of it.

All in all, this is a train wreck. While with a mostly
decent cast and some good ideas peppered throughout, the writing is
hypocritical to an astounding degree, the changes to the original range from
passable to dumbfounding, the music is cheap and not in any way fun and the
plain disrespect that this film has for the source material makes it a painful
watch. Jay-Z needs to stop producing movies, if this and The Great Gatsby are
anything to go by. It’s worse than Love Is Now, as this seemed to dedicate more
time to offending my sensibilities, but it’s still not as bad as Planes: Fire
And Rescue, as this film at least had some good intentions behind its plastic
veneer. Unless you actively want a nice heaping load of cinematic coal this Christmas, and you don't feel right about taking advantage of the recent Sony hack to get a copy of it, this is one to avoid.

Monday, 22 December 2014

Today’s film almost seems like the ultimate underdog story:
A filmmaking debut from an Australian director/writer partially funded by
Kickstarter and given a wide release in both Australia and the U.S. to massive
critical hype. This is the kind of production that gives me serious pride in my
country and what its creative minds can accomplish, as well as some faith in my
own creative ambitions knowing that others have paved the way. However, much
like films, a great story only means as much as what results from it. As such,
it’s time to engage in some more horror for the holidays: This is The Babadook.

The plot: Amelia (played by Essie Davis) finds a storybook
about the Babadook to read to her son Samuel (played by Noah Wiseman), but he
soon believes that the Babadook is real and is haunting them. As Samuel grows
more erratic in trying to kill the Babadook, Amelia begins to notice a strange presence
in their house as well and begins to crack.

This movie was first shown at the Sundance Film Festival and
it very much looks like porn for cinephiles: Dense with visual language
where every shot feels like they were researched to within an inch of their
lives in order to give the precise effect the director intends. Not only does
this look nice, but a lot of care and effort was put into the atmosphere and
overall scare factor of the film as well. A great example of this would have to
be the titular Babadook: Anytime we hear or see it, it’s never obnoxiously loud
or aiming for jump scares; rather, we get low but definitely menacing sounds
coming from it that don’t startle but rather creep under the skin, along with a
rather amazing effect in that the Babadook will sometimes move in faster
motions but somehow don’t notice induce that jump-scare effect while still
being unsettling.

Once we get into the writing, however, we see exactly what
aspect got more of the attention. Not to say that the writing is bad per se,
but rather you can definitely tell that this film puts a lot more emphasis on
how it looks and feels rather than how it reads and for the most part it works.
One theme in particular that stuck out, a clear example of the film’s academic
approach at work, is Amelia’s sexual frustration. With one of the key pre-film
plot points is a car accident that killed Amelia’s husband, along with a few
character moments that highlight said frustrations, it adds some surprising
layers to events in the third act that warrant some reading into. The director,
Jennifer Kent, apparently did some understudying with indie king of depression
Lars Von Trier and you can see traces of that in this film with both its look and
some of its writing aspects.

Throughout the film, we are given small hints that The
Babadook might just be a figment of one or both of the main characters’
imaginations and said hints are delivered with a refreshing amount of subtlety
that complements the story rather well. As the pieces begin to fall into place
and Amelia becomes more and more deranged as the film goes on, the tension
reaches every breaking point as you’re still not 100% sure whether the Babadook
is real or it is just the actions of an insane Amelia. *SPOILERS* However, once we get to the ending, it’s made painfully
aware that the film did too good a job at setting up Amelia as being behind it
all and all that effort is wasted as it is revealed that the Babadook is indeed
real. Now, this is a fairly standard route for a story like this to take but
this might be one of the few times when the story would greatly benefit from not having confirmed supernatural
elements to it; from the setup, it feels like this is going in the direction of
The Number 23 with its ending, only better, but it doesn’t deliver on the setup
much to my disappointment. To make matters worse, the ending is… kind of
bizarre and not in any good way. After Amelia stands up to the Babadook, it
stays at their house as what I can only assume is a pet. This is a serious
letdown and a bit too goofy for this kind of story; especially considering how
much more intense it was getting leading up to the climax.

However, with that said, quite a lot of the film’s bulk is
underwhelming for one simple reason: Samuel. Samuel might be one of the most
irritating characters I’ve seen in a movie this year, if not the most irritating. Sure, he’s only
irritating in that real world sense in that he acts like a normal six-year old
kid, flaws and all, but his constant screaming and general annoyances severely
detract from most of the film’s buildup. This is a major problem considering
one of the most important elements of the production is the relationship
between Samuel and his mother, with a lot of the tension coming from not
knowing exactly what Amelia is going to do to Samuel; since Samuel pretty much
sucks up a lot of good points whenever he’s onscreen, I doubt it was the
filmmaker’s intent for the audience to be rooting for Amelia to give this film
a downer ending. That might sound callous, and that’s because it is, but the
kid seriously gets that unwatchable at points.

All in all, this is extremely flawed but an admittedly
decent horror film. While the cinematic language can get a little too obtuse at
times for people who don’t study film theory (And yes, despite all my pretenses
of knowing what I’m talking about concerning films, that includes myself) and
it is let down by an underwhelming ending, the scares build up to a good
crescendo and the Babadook itself is a rather ingenious bit of creature creation. It
is, at the very least, a sign of good things to come and I hope Kent continues
to make films and ever improving on her craft. It’s better than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as the story ideas here showed quite a lot of promise, more so than any that that movie offered, but it ranks below Penguins Of Madagascar, which simply gave me mor enjoyment. Feel free to leave a comment below with your own thoughts on
the movie; this is another critical hit that I’m not as fussed about, so I’m
fully prepared for whatever vitriol may come my way for this unpopular opinion
of the film.

Sunday, 21 December 2014

Every so often, an actor will step forward and decide that
they want to become a director and make their own movie. This can sometimes
lead to great things: Clint Eastwood has had a very prolific and
critically-praised track record of directorial efforts over the last decade or
so and Ben Affleck made a major comeback in Hollywood with films like The Town
and Argo. However, it can also lead to rather disastrous things: William
Shatner made a dog’s breakfast out of Star Trek V, Eddie Murphy’s Harlem Nights
is one of his many cinematic punchlines, and the less said about the
brain-melting confusion that is Crispin Glover’s What Is It?, the better. Today’s
film is the directorial debut of love-him-or-hate-him actor Russell Crowe: This
is The Water Diviner.

The plot: In the wake of the Battle of Gallipoli, Connor
(played by Russell Crowe) travels to Turkey in order to locate his sons who
were ANZAC soldiers. When he discovers that one of them may still be alive, he
clings onto hope and tries to locate him in the midst of open hostilities
between the Turks, the English and the Greeks.

There were three warning signs that this film was going to
be bad: One, it stars Jai Courtney, a man who is a sentient red flag for bad
movies at this rate; two, it’s a theatrical release that lists Channel Seven
Australia as one of its production companies; three, the only one of its two
writers with previous credits, Andrew Knight, is largely known for comedic
works, mostly associated with the D Generation like Fast Forward and Full
Frontal. The first sign turned out to be a rather weird high point, because Jai
Courtney is one of the few actors in this movie that looks like he’s even
trying. I may bash Jai’s lousy skills at picking decent scripts, but his acting
is not being brought into question here in any way. Special props should also
be given to Yilmaz Erdogan as Major Hasan, who does a good job with his rather
layered character as a Turkish soldier who helps Connor find his sons, Ryan
Corr as one of Connor’s sons Arthur, who is a keystone in the most emotional
scene of the film, and Jacqueline McKenzie as Connor’s wife Eliza, who gives a
performance with more depth to it in her minimal time on screen than most of
the others do in the entire movie. Everyone else, Crowe included, comes across
as either broadly drawn, cold, texting in their performances, or all of the
above in a few rare cases. Crowe shows the kind of blandness that he has gotten
a bad reputation for giving, Dylan Georgiades as Orhan is annoying in that way
that only awkward child actors can manage and Dan Wyllie plays the most
stereotypical British army officer I’ve ever seen outside of a proper comedy.

The second sign results in a film that looks unbelievably
cheap. For a start, the sound mixing is off by miles with this weird running
motif of isolating a single diegetic sound and playing just that in some
scenes, even in places where it doesn’t feel right to do so like when a scene
of Russell Crowe walking into the distance has the sound of shoveling dirt into
his wife’s grave played over it and nothing else. Sure, the idea could
have worked but the execution left a lot to be desired. We also get a lot of random slow-mo shots, in one
case for only a literal second of screen time, with no narrative reason or
point. It's almost as if the film itself knows how slap shod it is, considering how often this film will suddenly start a fight scene with Connor and whatever soldiers are in his way; sure, it's a nice reprieve from the nothing that is the majority of the film, but it's distracting and more than a little jarring with how out-of-nowhere it gets before too long. However, as annoying as all these are, they are frankly small potatoes
compared to one of the biggest sins you can commit in a theatrically released
film: Recycling footage. Whenever this film shows scenes set during the Battle
of Gallipoli, most of it is just the same shots shown each time as if this was
a dodgy straight-to-DVD action movie. Far as I’m concerned, no matter how small
your production and/or budget, that is just plain unacceptable for an audience
paying movie ticket prices.

The third sign resulted not so much in a film that felt more like an awkward comedy than a drama, as one would expect, but rather a film that
is badly written in many other ways. We have a plot that largely meanders
around its supposed crux of Connor finding his sons dead or alive, and that’s
assuming that that is even the intent of the film in the first place. The
trailer for this movie makes it look like some kind of mystery/suspense
thriller involving Connor finding some kind of secret about the one son that he
couldn’t find the remains of. What we actually
get is nowhere near that enticing: Rather, the story has maybe enough plot for
a 45 minute TV show episode (Fitting, given writer Andrew Knight’s primary
experience in television) but is padded out with what are essentially plot roadblocks.
The main thing that lengthens this film is that there are a handful of people
who won’t let Connor go to where he needs to go for various and occasionally
baffling reasons; if they weren’t there, this would probably only run long
enough to be a Tropfest entry if that. To add to this, there is something
seriously bizarre concerning Connor as a character that is never really given
notice. At first glance, having a main character who is a water diviner sounds
off because, quite frankly, water divining is right up there with phrenology
and medical leeches in terms of scientific accuracy, but it gets even weirder the
longer it carries on. The character in-film admits that his water divining
doesn’t always work, but then we get several dream sequences peppered
throughout that seem to lead Connor to where he needs to be in the plot. If
they came right out and said that he had something mystical about him then fine
(Hell, it might have actually opened the way for more dramatic opportunities) but instead we’re only left with a general inkling that
Russell Crowe might be a wizard.

However, for all the crap I give this film, it does have one
good thing going for it throughout: The Turks. Connor’s relationship with Hasan
makes for the only genuine regular interaction between characters in this film
and the underlying theme of how badly the battle affected the Turks is pretty
bold for a film of this kind. We are shown that, in contrast to Connor’s desire
to find his sons, that the Turkish army suffered heavy casualties as well and
yet the ANZACs that now occupy their country aren’t lifting a finger to find their remains on the battlefield. There’s
also an interesting motif of how, throughout the film, the Turks help Connor
out the most: The English just want him gone, the ANZACs are ineffective and
the Greeks just try to kill him. Given how patriotic we can get when it comes to the ANZACs, it's an exceptionally bold move to show the Turks as even-handedly as they did here and, in the hands of a far better director, could've potentially made for a seriously powerful and necessary look at Australian racial sensitivities connected to Gallipoli. Oh well.

All in all, this is a shocker. Russell Crowe joins the
Hollywood shitlist of actors who should never be given the director’s chair
again with a debut that has a cast that is half phoning it in and half doing
their best with the little that they’re given, a production crew that cuts
corners like they’re trying to make a paper snowflake on film and a script that
needed major doctoring before it could even pass for a TV episode. It ranks
worse than Exodus: Gods And Kings, which at least had a couple of decent ideas that
were carried out well, but better than The Hundred-Foot Journey, as at least
this film didn’t feel like it wasted my time as much as that did.

As always, feel free to leave a comment below with your own
thoughts on the movie, or if you simply want to provide some feedback on the
review itself.

Saturday, 20 December 2014

While the film season in the U.S. sees January/February as
the dumping ground for the previous year’s leftovers, it’s the complete
opposite case in Australia. The beginning of the year marks Oscar season, the
time when all the big awards contenders that haven’t already been released are
brought to the masses en masse. Since my recent cinematic compulsion began a
few months after that season, I unfortunately missed more than a few of them.
As my inevitable year-end lists would be conspicuously incomplete without
mention of such films, I plan on using my new-found extra time to look back and
see as many of these as possible before the New Year. As such, what better way
to start than with one of the biggest critical darlings of that season? This is
12 Years A Slave.

The plot: Solomon (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a free
black man in the 1800’s, who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Over the next
12 years, he endures what can only loosely be called life as a slave worker in
one of the bleakest periods of human history.

The cast here is nigh-on impeccable: Chiwetel does an
amazing job as Solomon, portraying all of the raw despair and at times betrayal
that his character suffers with laser-precision; Michael Fassbender and
Benedict Cumberbatch play two oddly contrasting slave owners with the sort of
finesse that should be expected from either actor and Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey
is nothing short of heartbreaking throughout, making for the most emotional
part of an already intense production. Cumberbatch and Fassbender represent a
major point in this film’s favour: How balanced its depiction of white people
is. This may sound odd for me to highlight, but it is a stereotypical depiction
of slave owners for them to be one-dimensional monsters with no sense of
remorse or humanity. Here, through these two as well as numerous other actors,
we are shown more fleshed out and human portrayals of these people. True, we’re
still dealing with characters who see human life as property, but seeing such
characters as more than just simple demons for the audience to use as their One
Minute Hate is a refreshing touch to the overall story. The direction,
likewise, is outstanding: Steve McQueen, a man who must have parents who are
the biggest film nerds ever by his name alone, shows a great eye for cinema
with the way this film is shot, particular the use of long shots in a few key
scenes. The long shot of Solomon as he waits for his master to free him from a
noose is a seriously harrowing image to see, even considering how the bleak the
film is as a whole.

Now for the part of the review that is guaranteed to piss
some people off: While this film is undeniably well-made and well-acted, and I
understand that the setting is one that should by all means be shown as dark
and depressing, this film is too
depressing. It is seriously draining in how bleak it is, a factor that
unfortunately saps away at a lot of the film’s strengths. The best, and really
the only, way to illustrate this is by comparison: Earlier this year, we had
These Final Hours, a film about one man’s actions during the last hours before
Earth is destroyed. The film, naturally, is very bleak and disheartening but it
at least had the foresight to include small beats to break up the depressing
tone so as not to overload the audience; every so often, there’d be a character
moment of kindness and/or hope that would raise the mood slightly, something
that made the overall production easier to swallow. Then again, I’d be
perfectly fine with this kind of mood in film if there was some greater purpose
to it, but whatever purpose lies at the heart of this film feels disjointed at
best. Why do I say this? Well, here is where we delve into one of the only
sticks in the mud when it comes to the cast: Brad Pitt as Samuel Bass. Now,
Pitt is by no means a bad actor, but his casting is why he is getting mentioned
here. *SPOILERS* It is as a result
of Samuel and his interaction with Solomon that Solomon is eventually freed
from his servitude, and the first scene we see with Samuel is of him lecturing
Fassbender’s Edwin Epps about how black and white people are no different from
each other and no-one should be forced into this kind of lifestyle. To say that
this feels out of place would be an understatement and the fact that Pitt
himself is a producer on the film only makes this feel worse. Samuel has all of
two scenes in the film during the third act: He talks to Epps about how wrong
he is for owning slaves, and then talking with Solomon about getting his free
papers. Removed from however the events went in reality (This story is adapted
from a memoir of the real-life Solomon Northup), I can’t help but see this as a
moment of ego stroking for Pitt, detracting heavily from the already dismal
proceedings. I get the importance of this kind of story; my own government’s
treatment of asylum seekers is enough to make me realize that this is a book
that needed to be adapted for the wider public. However, as a whole, this doesn’t
feel like the right way to convey said story and the message at its heart.

All in all, this film is a depressing experience and not in
a good way. A good depressing film is one that makes you feel down but also
feels like it deserves such emotions and is rewarding as an experience; a bad
depressing film is one that just makes you feel down and doesn’t offer much in
way of justification for such. Maybe it’s also a slight case of overhype, but
for whatever the reason this did not resonate with me as it has with so many
others. It has a great cast and a great director behind it, and I get that such
a setting needs an appropriately bleak tone, but “Too much of a good thing”
definitely applies here. It is by no means a bad movie; but its unrelenting
bleak tone is far more than I am able to take. This ranks higher than Chef, as
what is good about this film is a lot more consistent throughout, but below Blended, and if the notion of an Adam Sandler film being more emotionally affecting than this sounds off-putting, trust me when I say that I get it. As a film critic, I cannot bring myself to give that high a
recommendation to this film. However,
as a simple human being, I recommend that everyone see this movie at least once;
this is something that needs to be seen, as far as I’m concerned.

It’s one thing to go into a film with a general assumption
about whether it’ll be good or bad based on what you know about the film
beforehand. It’s quite another thing, however, when you go into a film without
any idea what to expect because, quite frankly, you don’t know thing one about
the film itself. Granted, this is far less a case for people who do the
sensible thing and choose what they see at the cinema, but for critics who have
to see and give an opinion on as many movies that come out as possible (or
idiots like me who have a compulsion to do a similar thing), there can be the
occasional blinder. The last time this happened for me personally, funnily
enough, was on another Bollywood movie called Happy New Year, which I have
reviewed previously. This is another one of those occasions: This is PK.

The plot: Tipsy (played by Aamir Khan) is an alien who lands
on Earth and immediately gets the remote to his spaceship stolen, leaving him stranded.
He soon turns to God and a local TV reporter Jaggu (played by Anushka Sharma)
to help him get it back, and has to confront a big-time godman Tapasvi (played
by Saurabh Shukla) along the way.

I don’t like making assumptions about other cultures, but
consider that I have minimal at best experience with Bollywood films. As such,
this is a lot less focused on the music than I am used to. With Kick and Happy
New Year, the musical numbers were diversions from the main story and were
occasionally jarring; here, the music complements the action rather well. We’re
dealing with comedy, so we get some goofy songs like Tharki Chokro as well as
some more romantic numbers like Love Is A Waste Of Time. The music itself is
very lively with a lot of orchestral elements, making for an energetic and
vibrant soundtrack. Easily, the highlight would have to be Bhagwan Hai Kahan Re
Tu, where Tipsy sings about his attempts to find and talk to God. It’s the kind
of song that encapsulates the core of the film’s intent, and that core is
something that honestly needs to exist in Western cinemas.

We’ve seen fish out of water stories with aliens before, and
some have even tackled similar subject matter to this before, but this is
certainly a refreshing take on an old idea. It takes a certain kind of writer
to properly portray that feeling of not knowing thing one about where you are,
what to do or what to say, especially through the eyes of a literal alien, but
the writing here combined with Aamir’s great performance pulls it off rather
well. He has a very Mr. Bean-like innocence to him that makes his actions and decisions kind of adorkable, but not to the point where he comes across as annoying at any point. We see Tipsy interact with human commerce and religion, pointing out how
little sense they both make at their respective bottom lines (e.g. Pieces of
paper with people’s faces on them, but only specific pieces of paper, are
traded for goods and favors from deities), and also how muddled various
religions can make things for people who don’t know what they believe in (e.g. Some
cultures wear white at weddings, other wear white at funerals). With so many
different faiths saying contradictory things to one another, as well as holding
traditions that would be baffling to most outsiders at first, it’s easy to see
how confusing it could be for someone in Tipsy’s position. As the numerous
theologies start to congeal and form something cohesive to Tipsy, the script
becomes even sharper as a religious satire and actually began to win my heart a
little. Now, this may all sound a tad sacrilegious but let’s be clear here:
This film isn’t attacking religion. This film is attacking organized religion; you know, the people who claim that you can
simply buy your way to salvation by forking over money for trinkets or simple
donations in the three digit or higher bracket. I’ve discussed before some of
my own religious beliefs and how I have a very live-and-let-live approach to
other people’s beliefs, but I vehemently have no patience for people like this
and personally think that there’s a special place in damnation just for them. Even
with all that said, this film is surprisingly balanced with its approach to
faith. While it does have some barbs to throw through Tipsy’s eyes at some aspects of religion as being
partially nonsensical, Tapasvi brings up at least a couple of good points about
how faith gives people the comfort they need to carry on with their lives.
Best, and possibly weakest, part of the film has to be the climax where Tipsy
and Tapasvi have a televised religious debate: Best, because it contains some of the most poignant writing I've seen in quite a while; worst, because there is one part that is... questionable. No spoilers here, because this is genuinely one to check out for yourself, but in retrospect it seems extremely obvious that this would happen and it's slightly hackneyed. However, even with that in mind, it's well-handled for what it is.

All in all, given how I went into this film knowing next to
nothing about it, this is an extremely pleasant surprise. If you are fine with
watching films like Dogma or The Invention Of Lying without getting too offended, then this is definitely
one to check out: The acting is superb with Aamir doing a fantastic job as
Tipsy; the music is lively and does well at accompanying the film; the romantic
side of things thankfully avoids a lot of the more aggravating clichés of the
rom-com; and the writing is almost Douglas Adams-esque in its poignancy and wit.
Talking about religion, especially in this format, is like poking a hive full
of angry bees; thankfully, this film’s writing is nimble enough to avoid
getting stung and share the honey that rests inside. This ranks higher than Noah,
as the themes of faith are explored in a greater variety here, but not as high
as How To Train Your Dragon 2, which hits harder on the emotional side of
things.

But, what did you
think of the movie? Clever and thought-provoking? Offensive and blasphemous?
All of the above? Somewhere in between? Whatever the case, feel free to leave a
comment below with your own thoughts of the movie.

Wednesday, 17 December 2014

Given my compulsion to review every new film I see, I will inevitably
come across some films that are easier to talk about than others; whether it’s
because it’s easier to talk about bad films than good ones or because some
films engage me more and leave me more to work with in terms of writing, not
every film will give me the same amount of content. This is such an occasion,
only for different reasons than usual. It isn’t because this film is entirely
good, leaving me with less to talk about, nor did it fail to leave me with much
to talk about. No, this time the difficulty in writing a review for this movie
is, put simply, because it is just plain unpleasant to recollect. We’ll get to
exactly why that is in due time, but for now let’s get started with the review
proper: This is Horrible Bosses 2.

The plot: Nick, Dale and Kurt (played by Jason Bateman,
Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis respectively) go into business together with a
gadget called the Shower Buddy. They negotiate a business deal with Burt Hanson
(played by Christoph Waltz) who then screws them over and leaves them in debt.
As revenge, they arrange to hold his Burt’s son Rex (played by Chris Pine)
hostage to get ransom money from Burt. Things go awry, however, when Rex
discovers the plan… and wants in.

As part of my preparation for whatever I go to see in the
cinema, if it’s a part of a series, I will usually go back and watch whatever
films came before it to get more of an idea of what I’m getting myself into.
For example, when Step Up: All In came out, I went back and watched the first
four Step Up films before going to see it. As such, I went ahead and caught up
on the first Horrible Bosses movie and… it’s alright. It had a lot of problems, like the overabundance
of jokes about male rape along with subsequent brushing-off of male rape as not
being a big deal by some of the main characters, but after it got past the
first act it picked up the pace and managed to deliver a decent enough movie,
provided you are willing to stick out for the long haul. How does this film
hold up by comparison? Somehow, it is both better and worse than that movie
was. Regardless, however, this is very much a proper continuation of the
previous film for better or for worse: For better because it at least feels
like this film has some partial reason to exist as a means of continuing the
story; for worse because it heavily assumes that you have the previous film
fresh in your memory when seeing this one, given the nature of a lot of the
callbacks to that film are read.

The cast here have a lot of fun with their roles and that
makes way for the audience to have fun watching them: A returning Jason Bateman
continues to do a great job as the straight man in the main trio; Jamie Foxx
does a bit more scene-stealing here, and feels slightly shoehorned into the
story as a result, but he still has that charisma that helped make his role in
the original so memorable; and Kevin Spacey returns for a few scenes to make
some of the film’s best moments once again. On top of the returning cast, we
also have some newcomers: Christoph Waltz has made a major name for himself in
the last few years for playing fun villains and he adds another notch to that
bedpost here. He may not be as deliciously vile as the bosses were previously,
but he manages to pull off his role with the right amount of hateable and
watchable. Chris Pine, however, is an entirely different story: He is
absolutely amazing in his role as Rex. He undoubtedly has the most fun out of
all the actors and turns that into the best performance of the movie; every
second he’s on screen, he has insane comedic energy that keeps audiences
engaged regardless of what’s going on in-scene. The downside of the cast,
unfortunately, is Day and Sudeikis as the other two leads. They have a little
too much fun and seem to slack off a bit in terms of their performances. Sure,
Day has a couple of moments where he is able to make his mark, but otherwise
the two of them seem to stay in neutral for the majority of the film.

People who say that comedy isn’t an exact science have yet
to see this movie. I’ve seen films before with predictable jokes, but it’s not
until this film that I have come across predictable character dynamics, or at
least to this degree. Here’s pretty much every interaction between the three
mains: Nick is the straight man, Kurt is the pronounced asshole (at
least, more so than the others) and Dale is the Galifianakis wannabe; whenever
someone suggests something, Kurt and Dale immediately agree with it until
someone else (usually Nick) points out a flaw with it and then they
immediately agree with that instead.
Rinse and repeat a few times per scene and you have the interactions. In terms
of content, I am extremely thankful that they decided to dial down the
reprehensible male rape jokes. However, to replace it, they decided to crank up
the gay jokes in their place, which only slightly less obnoxious. My own sexual preferences notwithstanding, I do
not get why this is still a go-to brand of comedy; it rarely comes across as
funny to me and it’s one of the few things that I actively question why other
people find it funny. Call me a killjoy if you want, it’s just how I feel about
the whole thing. However, with that said, whenever this film makes a good joke,
it aims well and brings major laughs with it. What’s more, once this film gets
into a rhythm, it can deliver strings of good jokes that definitely help
improve this film. The comedy, put simply, is a mixed bag: When it’s good, it’s
really good; when it’s bad, it’s quite irritating.

This is a decent plot, if slightly predictable concerning
the ending. I won't spoil it here, but it’s something that is lampshaded
in-film because of how obvious it is (Although, admittedly, said predictable
moment is still handled well). Rather than going with Sequel Rule #34, the
writers make a genuine attempt to tell a different story, while still keeping
continuity with the original. The way it keeps continuity is to be commended as
well: Plot points in the previous film that were left open are continued here,
and even points that were resolved lead to some decision made by the heroes in
this film. It all goes well… until the ending. It is here that we are greeted
with the main reason why this film is so unpleasant to recall. This ending
leaves a proper foul taste in the mouth, and kind of sullies a lot of the good
that came before it. After the climax, there’s a short epilogue that shows what
happens to the characters after the fact, and we get a solid punch to the face
with what seems like all of the date rape jokes that they refrained from using
earlier all at once. Not only that, while the first film had an ending that
felt triumphant and saw our main characters in a better place than they were
when they started, here we are left with them in a worse position than they
were in before, Day perhaps the most so (Again, spoilers, but his resolution is
the entire reason the epilogue feels so bad).

All in all, while a marked improvement over the original in
some respects, this still has a lot of issues. What’s worse is that, in all
honesty, most of these issues could have been forgiven had it not been for the
sucker punch of an epilogue that just sours the production as a whole. However,
I still give this film a recommendation, if for nothing more than to see Chris
Pine give one of his best performances to date. This ranks higher than Love,
Rosie, as the writing here felt like more effort was put into it, but lower
than Edge Of Tomorrow, everyone’s favourite cinematic roadblock, as that film
was a lot more consistent with its good points.

Saturday, 13 December 2014

When one of the most prominent trailers for your film
contains your main character licking earwax from a toothbrush, you can be
forgiven for assuming the worst. Add to that that we’re dealing with a film
aimed primarily at kids and we’re dealing with a high probability of running
from the theatre wanting to burn everything. I have never read any of the
original books, and only have marginal knowledge about the character itself;
this means that I only had the very disheartening trailer to go on. This is the
kind of recipe that results in clouds of thick black smoke, melted lab
equipment and possibly the need for several HAZMAT suits. What does this cook
up in practice? Let’s dig in and find out: This is Paddington.

The plot: After an earthquake destroys his home in Peru,
Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) travels to London in search of a new home.
He comes across Mr. Brown (played by Hugh Bonneville) and his family, who
reluctantly lets them take Paddington in until he finds a proper home.
Paddington has to find a home, all the while avoiding Millicent (played by
Nicole Kidman), an insane taxidermist who wants to stuff and mount him in an exhibition
at the Natural History Museum.

Director/co-writer Paul King has an… interesting
filmography: On one hand, he’s worked on cult British comedies like The Mighty
Boosh and Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace; on the other hand, he also directed the
television equivalent of exsanguination that is Come Fly With Me. This film,
initially, feels like it would be outside of his rather darker comfort zone,
but it doesn’t take long for this film to prove that assumption wrong. The
humour here is very evenly balanced for both age groups, like a true family
film should be, and it largely succeeds with its jokes. Sure, there are a few
groaners like a brief foray into drag comedy (Something that is only done right
about 0.001% of the time) and the aforementioned earwax scene which, after
seeing it so many times in the trailer, I just flat out didn’t look at when it
was on-screen, but those aren’t enough to detract too much from the jokes that
work. I hate to sound elitist when it comes to what I personally find funny
(oh, why stop now?), but I have a great affinity for that pronounced British
sense of humour and this film is riddled with it. Perhaps a little too much, as
some of the smaller jokes are bits of wordplay on British slang that isn’t
really used anywhere else.

Even removed from the comedic side of things, this is pretty
well-written in terms of dialogue and plot. While we do get some typical
hallmarks of the fish-out-of-water story, like the characters who irrationally
don’t like the main character and the third act “They don’t want me here
anymore” cliché, but I can at least say that this film handles them well for
the most part. The initial disdain is brief and the transition from that to
friendship is a lot smoother than I’ve seen in other films. As for the third
act cliché… yeah, that’s probably the biggest strike against this film: For the
rest of the running time, it seems to be poking fun at its own story quirks, as
well as some of its cheesier moments, but then that plot point comes in and the heart sinks just a bit.
Thankfully, it picks right back up again without much delay, so at least isn’t
as big a problem as it could have been. The plot is a lot more focused than one
would expect, too: There’s never a point in the film where it feels like the
writers are dragging their feet to fill up the running time. Not only that,
there is proper thought put into some rather crucial plot elements, such as the
villain’s motives and the reasons for why Paddington goes to London; put
simply, a bear that can talk English walking around London and not constantly
having phone cameras pointed at him is the furthest your disbelief will be
suspended. It may seem extremely cynical to put special mention to the writers
of a family film doing their friggin’ jobs and actually writing a good script,
but after Planes: Fire And Rescue, I have learnt to appreciate such things even
more.

The cast all do a spectacular job with their respective
roles. Ben Whishaw and Hugh Bonneville, whose respective careers have made
tremendous leaps and bounds into the Hollywood mainstream in the last few
years, play very well against each other as the sugar and salt at the core of
the film; Peter Capaldi, despite his relatively smaller role, has some fun with
his role and makes for some good comedy with his interactions with Millicent
and Mr. Brown; Julie Walters pretty much steals every scene she’s in; Jim
Broadbent, despite his distracting attempt at a German (I think?) accent, does
well with his largely expository role; and Matt Lucas has a bordering-on-cameo
role that is actually enjoyable to watch and not grating as per his Little
Britain caricatures. Nicole Kidman shows a definite improvement from her
performance in Before I Go To Sleep, but I would have to say that she is the
weak link in the cast list. Sure, she does well as the crazy villain, but it
definitely feels like there is something missing from it. Then again, the last
time we got Kidman as the villain in a family film was in The Golden Compass
and the less said about that the better.

All in all, this is the perfect kind of movie to see during the
holiday season, whether you go with your kids or just go on your own. It’s
tailor-made to give the audience that warm fuzzy feeling that only good family
films can manage, and it pulls it off rather well with good comedy, a great
cast list and a lively Calypso soundtrack. I admittedly went into this
expecting it to be boring at best and, if I didn’t have to see it for a review,
I would have just ignored; please don’t make that mistake and check it out for yourself.
It ranks higher than The Maze Runner, as this was more consistently good, but
just below Fat Pizza Vs. Housos, where the manic energy of the comedy kept me
more engaged.

But, what did you
think of it? Love it? Hate it? Indifferent to it? Whatever the case, feel free
to leave a comment below and give us your own thoughts on the movie.